File Systems
One of the most important roles of an operating system is to define and manage the file system. The file system is a component of the operating system that acts as an interface with hardware storage devices, and organizes data on them in a form that can be used by the computer system and by the applications. The file system defines the file naming conventions, file size, and, in some cases, the capacities of the storage products themselves. The modern computer can have several different file systems as different types of storage media often require different types of formatting or translation. CD-ROM devices, DVD devices and Zip drives are, for example, manufactured with a specific file system already in place on them. Magnetic media like floppy drives and hard disks employ several different types of file systems, depending on the operating system on the target computer. The various versions of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems, i.e., Windows NT 3.11, Windows NT 3.11, Windows NT 3.11, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 offers the use of two file systems. These are: FAT-based file systems and the NTFS file system.